Comedy: Eddie Izzard – Stripped, Live in Perth 18th November 2011

Eddie Izzard – Stripped
Burswood Theatre
18 Nov 2011

By Shane Pinnegar

Eddie Izzard’s ‘action transvestite’ character was nowhere to be seen tonight at the Burswood Theatre, but his manic energy, razor sharp wit and keen sense of the absurd was out in spades as he rambled through a hugely entertaining series of rants over a couple of hours.

Izzard’s genius, like many of the best stand up comedians (Billy Connelly especially comes to mind) is in making a cleverly scripted 2 hour show sound like it’s a stream of consciousness dissertation in the local pub, and as he bounds from one seemingly unrelated topic to another.

Dinosaurs, evolution, the monarchy, the existence of God (“OK, I have a test to prove if there’s a God or not. God, if you’re there, come down now.”), Noah and The Ark (“Did Noah put two of every animal in the world on to the ark? No. How can I be so sure? Try it!”), the computer revolution, mobile phones (at the start of the second half, he plays a youtube clip of his famous Death Star Canteen sketch to save him remembering it or getting it wrong) – all true, he says, because he Wikipedia’d it!

It’s a show guaranteed to irk creationists everywhere, and indeed several people near us upped stumps and left as he made his athieist opinions known, but more fool them for not rolling with the jokes, as the rest of the crowd, believers or otherwise, happily sat the show out and left holding their sides, still painful from laughing non stop at this extraordinary man’s performance.

Category: Comedy Reviews